IRS chief defiant on Lois Lerner email loss

A defiant IRS Commissioner on Friday refused to apologize for the loss of ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails, and said the agency produced what they could, at a combative hearing marked by accusations by Republicans of IRS deceit.

The meeting comes a week after the agency revealed that two years worth of emails to and from Lerner, the ex-official at the center of the tea party targeting controversy, were lost when her hard drive crashed in 2011.

Democrats said there was no evidence of bad faith, but the GOP accused Koskinen of hiding the missing emails from Congress, saying the agency and the White House knew for months there was a problem before they told the Hill. They chastised him for not mentioning it during several appearances before Congress this spring.

“You can blame it on a technical glitch, but it is not a technical glitch to mislead the American people,” Camp said. “What you have lost is all credibility.”

A sometimes feisty Koskinen accused Camp and the committee of jumping to false conclusions when it didn’t have all the facts.

For example, on Monday Republicans on the panel issued a press release after meeting with agency officials, asserting that the IRS had lost the emails of six other employees involved in the controversy who had computer crashes. They highlighted former IRS Commissioner chief of staff Nikole Flax, another key figure.

That’s wrong, Koskinen said. Flax had two IRS computers, including one for travel, so the IRS emails are intact as far as they know. Another one of the six listed had their computer crash just a couple months ago in 2014.

“Those press releases with regard to Nicole Flax were inaccurate and misleading and it demonstrates why we’ll provide this committee a full report … when it is completed,” he said. “We are not going to dribble out the information and have it played out in the press.”

It was Lerner’s admission of the inappropriate singling out of applications that set off the tea party furor in May of last year, followed days later from an inspector general report critical of the practice, but largely citing faulty management. She asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to testify about her role in the matter, so Congressional investigators have demanded the IRS turn over her emails.

Defense of the IRS and accusations of a coverup fell on party lines at Friday’s hearing.

“There is absolutely no evidence… to show that Lerner’s computer crash is anything more than equipment failure,” said Rep. Sandy Levin (Mich.), the ranking Democrat.

Several Republicans called the timing of her computer crash suspicious, coming 10 days after Camp’s first letter about the treatment of political nonprofits went to the IRS back in 2011.

Meanwhile, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) mocked what Democrats call conspiracy theorists, asking Koskinen about what he knew of Obama’s birth certificate, the Benghazi attack and “Area 51 in … new Mexico where all those space aliens allegedly came.”

While Koskinen had generated some good will when he first took over as IRS chief — he was appointed a fix-it man by President Barack Obama to clean up the mess — that appears to be gone. Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) at one point suggested that he was a pawn of the administration that would move on in a few months or a year, but Koskinen clarified that he intended to serve out the rest of his five-year term “come whatever it may be.”

He reiterated that he will not resign to the press during a committee break.

Much of the criticism leveled on Friday centered on why lawmakers just found out last Friday that Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011 are gone.